My blog is already blocked in the UAE, but just in case someone thinks about unblocking it, here’s some objectionable nudity for you all.
See this article on boingboing for what this is all about. And yes, boycott SmartFilter.
Month: February 2006
Anagram Map of Former Rochester Subway
BoingBoing has been spreading a meme where people mix up underground maps by replacing station names with anagrams. My contribution to this a map of a subway that no longer exists.
This is the Rochester, NY subway, or what it could have been. Rochester is the smallest US city to have had a subway, and in a typical case of urban decay, it was abandoned in 1965 and is now one of many industrial ruins. The green line shows the original railway, the orange line shows proposed extensions. None of it ever got past the planning stage.
There are now plans to fill in the tunnels with dirt, utterly destroying this landmark of Rochester history!
I got my map from this site and a lot of information from RocWiki.
[ media | Amadou et Mariam – Aristiya ]
x64 with the Platform SDK: The Horror!
If you still have Visual Studio 2003, the only way to build 64 bit applications for Windows seems to be the Platform SDK. This, however, is downward compatible with Visual Studio 6. And most of us probably remember what that means: The STL in there is shite. It’s an implementation from back in 1995. A lot of projects simply don’t support it and recommend you use STLport instead.
OMG, should I really have to install that thing again?
[ media | Briskeby – Joe Dallesandro ]
More x64 adventures
Since my earlier troubles, things have progressed rather nicely. I managed to install Visual Studio 2003 on the x64 machine, and a 64 bit compiler that came with the Platform SDK. I could have compiled my first 64 bit executable today, but I need to find out if any of the libraries I use are ported. I’ll need boost, libxml2, iconv, lua and luabind. Yeah, fat chance.
OpenOffice is still being difficult. Writer is the only part I can make work, and it doesn’t seem to be the dual-coreness of the machine that’s the problem – setting affinity to only one CPU made no difference.
Something positive: Miranda IM works nicely (as a 32 bit app), there is a 64 bit Java VM and 64 bit Python from ActiveState.
What this platform really needs though is a few machines in the Sourceforge compile farm and 64 bit MinGW.
64 bit windows adventures
As Kjetil put it, my new PC at work puts me way ahead of the curve. I got a AMD 64 bit Dual-Core machine, with 2 GB of RAM and 2×250 GB RAID-0. I figured XP Professional 64 bit would be the right OS to run.
There is not a lot of software availabel for 64 bit Windows. Luckily, it runs 32 bit legacy applications nicely, so it’s okay to mix and match. Still, there’s some trouble.
The first problem came after I installed Thunderbird. I installed the official 32 bit release, because the 64 bit releases struck me as pretty experimental. When I fired it up, it almost immediately reported “connection timed out connecting to server” on my IMAP account. Turns out, there’s a known bug in Thunderbird with dual core machines: The timing code uses the QueryPerformanceCounter() fucntion. It can be fixed by assigning a processor affinity to the program, so it only runs on one of the two cores. You can do this either manually from the taskmanager, or once and for all using a progam called imagecfg.exe (goolge for it if you need it).
The next issue was more serious: There are no 64 bit versions of TortoiseCVS and TortoiseSVN. The reason that’s serious is that they are explorer shell extensions, and to extend the 64 bit Windows Explorer, your program has to be a 64 bit application. There’s a 32 bit version of Explorer for those cases, but I was hoping to avoid that kind of switching around. I mean, I’ll have the 64 bit Explorer open by default, so CVS will be cumbersome. Let’s hope they get on the case soon.
The third issue is compilers. We use VS2003 to make Anarchy Onlie, and while we’re not switching AO to 64 bit, I really want to be able to compile my own 64 bit apps. There’s no 64 bit compiler with VS2003, though (I hear that VS2005 has one), so I’m not sure where to get one from. Intel has one, but I’ve found it cumbersome to use. Which reminds me, I have to look into 64 bit cygwin. I guess that’s not ready yet.
But man, this thing is nice.
[ media | Briskeby-Joe Dallesandro ]